She spent a couple of years in Singapore – between 19 – before returning to spend the rest of her life in the UK. “The problem was that after My Boy Lollipop,” Blackwell was quoted by The Guardian of UK as saying, “We just couldn’t find another song of that calibre.”ĭespite a few attempts at shaking the one-hit-wonder tag with a couple of singles, Small resigned to the dictates of fate. Between 19, she also recorded singles like “Don’t You Know”, “Until You’re Mine” “Something’s Gotta Be Done”, “Sweet William”, “Oh, Henry”, “I Love the Way You Love”, “Bring It On Home To Me”, “My Street”, “It’s Too Late”, “Killer Joe”, “Carry Go Bring Come”, “Readin’ Writin’ Arithmetic” and “I Want You Never To Stop”, among several others. Somehow, the fame she enjoyed with “My Boy Lollipop” eluded her with her previous and subsequent songs. Her fame also extended to other countries, including Nigeria where “My Boy Lollipop” literally became one of the themes of the post-independence and Civil War years. Meanwhile, the song retained the No 2 in both the UK and the US charts. Small’s international tour would trail into the early 1970s.
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March 6 the following year saw her making an appearance on the Australian TV programme Bandstand as part of a concert in Melbourne. On December 28 the same year, she also featured in ITV’s Play of the Week episode “The Rise and Fall of Nellie Brown”, in which she played the role of Selina Brown. She, for instance, appeared in May 1964 as a guest on the ITV’s special programme Around the Beatles. This was where she made her fourth recording of “My Boy Lollipop”, courtesy a rearrangement by the Jamaican guitarist and composer Ernest Ranglin.Īlready two months its release, the hit single saw Small rising to sudden superstardom. Blackwell had taken her to Forest Hill district in London, where she received intense training in dancing and diction. Small, then a nubile 16-year-old had some time in late 1963 accompanied Blackwell – who besides being her legal guardian was set to manage her career – from Kingston to London. “I went with her around the world because each of the territories wanted her to turn up and do TV shows and such, and it was just incredible how she handled it.”
“It became a hit pretty much everywhere in the world,” Blackwell continued. That same year, the hit single chalked up international sales of 5 million copies. It was first recorded in New York in 1956 by Barbie Gaye before Small, appropriating similar rhythm, recorded her version in 1964. The song itself was her rendition of “My Girl Lollipop”, written in the mid-1950s by Robert Spencer of The Cadillacs, a group known for belting out the rhythm and blues genre known as doo-wop, which originated among the city-dwelling African-American youth in the 1940s.